


crowd-pleaser

by saucefx



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Candy Timeline, Depression, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Introspection, Jade POV, Jade-centric, Multi, accidental suicide attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24172723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saucefx/pseuds/saucefx
Summary: And there is no ultimatum, no moment where John leaves to tie up the timeline. Jade sits and waits and waits and waits until she’s making appointments to receive haircuts and check-ups from the carapace psychological hospital. It’s domestic and tormenting and she wonders where it went wrong.Something went wrong
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas (background), Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam (background), Roxy Lalonde/Calliope (Background)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 19





	crowd-pleaser

It isn’t that the narrative dismisses her as much as Jade Harley dismisses the narrative.

The first weeks of post-SBURB are easy, time spent flitting from couch to couch and alchemizing as many fun and work-appropriate outfits as she uses her powers to join in on Earth C construction. Sure they decide to fast-forward past the annoying political bits, why would she care? Jade has never been a part of any government as much as she might consider herself American. 

Kinda.

There’s a voice licking at the edge of her consciousness but all it does it murmur words of encouragement so she lets it go. Hearing voices is crazy talk and leads to isolation and creepy mental hospitals just like in the weird hipster art films Dave used to show her. 

Being lonely is the enemy and being healthy is the antithesis of being lonely, so Jade decides to be as healthy as possible so she’s never lonely again. 

Her outfits are popping and she knows she’s the only one other than Dave’s brotherdad who can complete the calculations necessary to instruct the burgeoning consort colleges springing up left and right about aerodynamics. It doesn’t make her feel any better when Karkat shies away from every attempt at so much as a shake of their hands.

Dave isn’t much better with how much he talks in circles so they don’t accidently breach a “real” subject. He seems tired of “real” subjects. Jade could talk about it all day, could wax about what she did on the meteor and how Davesprite looked when she touched the little feathers under his eyes, how Davepeta’s lips felt (quick and chapped) on hers before their claws tore through her the center of her chest. 

The green light reflecting off of their sly feline smirk haunts her when she’s awake and Jade spends a month watching Dave like a hawk to see it repeat. The most she catches is a few little peekings of a smile her way, a fully-fledged smile for Dirk and the tiniest, toothy grin flashed at Karkat late at night. It isn’t fair.

Not that it has to be fair in any semblance, it isn’t as if the universe has ever had any sympathy for how things “should” be when it concerns Jade Harley. John explained it to her- how her John and Davesprite died in order to protect the timeline. She wonders where Davesprite is, if all of them died or if they’re all living out in the dreambubbles somewhere talking to their own Karkats and Johns.

Jadesprite crosses her mind and Jade cuts up the flower she’s pruning in a fit of self-hatred and rage. Her shoulders shake afterwards, fingers curling into moist soil while she cries. These feelings should be over with. Pink petals scatter in the wind, arching up into a beautiful swirl she couldn’t give less of a shit about. 

These feelings should be gone. 

Jade turns twenty and only three of her best friends bother to show up to the party and she beams through the moments of awkward silence until hours later when she’s taking a scorching hot shower and staring at the tile wall: A buzzed fit of emotional agony. Her hands drag over her thighs and into her hair and tug at her cute little doggy ears like she could rip them right off. The tail curled between her legs used to be funny but now it’s just a sick cosmic joke. 

She crushes her glasses between her hand and then responsibly magicks out the pieces and heads to the nearest doctor. Everything is blurry and when Dave asked what happened she tells him that she cut it trying to chase a rabbit and he laughs. 

It’s hard not to turn into a bitter adult. Jade loves her friends and she loves Dave and Karkat but if Karkat oogles Jake’s ass on screen one more time while she’s in the room she might just scream. Jade thinks about a polyamorous relationship with other people constantly, a means to attention and always having at least one person on hand to care about her. 

Rose and Kanaya seem flattered when she spends a little too much time crashing in their house (a long weekend, she told them, when it turned into a week). She doesn’t beat around the bush for which they appreciate, but it’s mortifying when Kanaya straight up tells her that she has no interest in anyone but her wife. Rose flirts back like the tease she is until Kanaya snaps one afternoon. 

They have a laugh over it later, the failed attempt at entering a triad. Both Kanaya and Rose are kind but firm when they suggest she leaves and Jade shrugs, already lifting off the porch for a flight across the countryside. No matter, she’s just back to square one. 

Dave and Karkat are absent from their house when she arrives and neither of them answer her messages on Pesterchum. Sure sucks that this one shitty app from 2012 is the only momento left over from the human race. The consorts did start trying to make apps but the only one who makes headway on that is Roxy. 

Jade swings her legs off the side of their roof, tipping back until her back is pressed against concrete and she’s staring up at the weirdly blue sky. Roxy got a haircut, maybe so should she? But he got it for a reason, which makes it more okay? It’s frustrating to find ways to instigate change when Jade can’t even see any evidence indicating that she’s growing as a person.

Where the fuck are Karkat and Dave? They never go anywhere outside the house, did Dave finally convince Karkat to take that much-needed vacation? She thought that they agreed to take it together. To think that they would wait until she was gone one weekend to up and leave and lock up…

God dammit, Jade left like, SO many bras stashed in there. She thought that she was being subtle by the way those fuckers were lining the edges of that shitty garage-sale couch. She slept on that couch dammit, this is her HOME!!!!!

But it’s not. And the jungle flora and fauna around Jake’s house make Jade feel physically ill. The queasy twist in her stomach is the reason she stops looking at her phone, not because she knows that Dave won’t respond and that she shouldn’t bother to check. Her breathing is shuddery and fast and her mouth tastes like burnt toast. 

Jade shrinks the door to grab her bras off the couch and smears the tears on her cheeks away. 

She moves around like a zombie for a few days and then runs away entirely, pretends to be an animal living in the woods. The actual animals are afraid of her, probably something to do with the fact that she exudes raw static energy left over from the Green Sun before it burnt out. Huh. Green Sun.

Look, Jade can’t even say it in funny green font anymore that sun is so dead. None of their old running jokes have been funny enough to make her friends pay attention to her lately. To make them stay.

Callie makes an enthusiastic effort to help her out when she shows up on them and Roxy’s doorstep, torn dress covered in feathers and blood running down her chin. Jade is tired of sleeping on couches but she accepts the offer with a weary smile. The shower she takes is as long as it is legendary and she’s disappointed to find exactly zero hair-ties in the bathroom. 

She crashes on a pile of pillows on the floor by the couch, a comforting routine ever since she joined Dave and Karkat for their bro-troll snuggles. Jade hates sleeping on the floor because she never fails to wake up with a crick in her neck. 

It’s good to stay accumused to sleeping like this just in case Dave and Karkat come back. No, it’s good for when they come back. She doesn’t know why they would, though. 

Jade begins wondering when her life revolved around the two men in her life. They’re not even in her life romantically, they’re two idiots standing off to the side and doing their own awkward thing while she shoves her fingers into the mix. This could make it all better. This could make her better. This could make everything better.

Roxy shakes his head when Jade winks at him over breakfast the next morning and she drops that flirtation quicker than a match burning her hand. It was a long shot anyways to imagine that either Roxy or Callie would abandon their committed (romantic?) partnership to join her on the S.S. Insecurity Train. 

It was him who gave Jade the phone number to the nearest psychological institution. Roxy claimed it came from Dirk.

“He’s a bit too pompous to go himself, but is heart was in the right place when he gave it to me cause I wouldn’t explain my issues. Heh. Heart.”

Jade nods obligingly at the terrible joke and takes the number, stepping outside to give them an immediate call.

She notices that her voice sounds perkier than ever over the phone, and she wonders whether or not this makes it harder to believe she has… What, PTSD? Depression? John seemed depressed the last time Jade talked to him, but then again, what’s new? If all he does it keep critiquing his friends all the time for things that they can’t help then how does he expect to get happy?

“Hi there!” Says Jade, and the line goes to static. After a moment, she calls again, and the machine puts on some cheerful music, tells her that she’s on hold.

Callie looks pleased when she hands the phone back ten minutes later, left sleeve pulled down to hide the scratch marks down her wrist. Roxy is delighted that she ‘scheduled an appointment.’ They talk about it for about an hour before Jade gets so sick of it that she fakes a headache and floats out of the room.

She does attend therapy eventually, and it’s not a total dead end. Jade yells, she waves her hands, talks herself into and out of holes relentlessly until the soft chime rings and she glances over to see her carapacian doctor holding up a paper with squiggles diligently drawn on the page. 

Jade giggles, she laughs until she’s crying again and her stomach hurts and she’s breathing so hard and fast that they cart her to the hospital and then she laughs even harder because she’s a GOD and they think she’s having a PANIC ATTACK and then she blacks the fuck out. 

The hospital bills are pretty cheap, at least. It looks like Dave is doing good things with the economy, and when Dad comes to pick her up in his beat up car she has the notion to be grateful instead of ashamed. He rests his hand on top of her head and she hugs him and for just a second she thinks about how much they both must miss him. 

Karkat and Dave are back from their vacation when she returns home, and she ignores the way they watch her like two lost puppies as she silently collects the rest of her things. Jade is done being scattered, no matter what it costs, she will start a fucking home. 

“Where you goin, Harley?” Dave speaks up, offering a beer like a lifeline and her powers shatter the glass bottle, making Dave flinch and Karkat start to yell.

“I am. So, so sorry-!” She sputters, and stumbles back over the clutter of cardboard boxes and swords lining the floor as her face flushes with mortification. 

Jade catches herself with her powers and flies away, ignoring the shouts which boomerang after her on the way out. Her chest is doing that panicky thing again but then she thinks of Dad murmuring stories about Grandpa on their trip from the hospital and decides that she can’t go back. 

She catches the first bus she sees, and spends the ride staring at a family of nakodiles. The two little nakodiles keep gurgling at each other, and both of them are wearing glasses. Jade thinks of John. Her last six messages have been left on read, but she sends him a friendly greeting since Pesterchum lists him as ‘online’.

Another hour slips away without a response. 

Her phone buzzes with messages from Karkat and Dave, and while Jade knows that she’s a hypocrite, she can’t bring herself to answer. The thought of them together makes the pit in her chest grow, shearing rib after rib until it can form a great big chasm right in the center. 

Envy is darker than it was portrayed in the movies she watched as a kid, bushy hair draped over her shoulders while she flopped over a pile of squiddles. Back then, the only hand she remembered holding was Grandpa’s, thick and calloused. 

Jade steps off of the bus once they reach what looks to be a shady motel. The nakodile behind the counter holds up a baggie of white powder, and Jade accepts it without second thought.

She dumps her bags in the only corner that isn’t water-stained, spends an hour trying to sleep, before giving up and trying to snort the powder.

It burns her throat, and she hacks it up over the sink when it stops up her nose. A whine breaks out, thin and pathetic, and Jade decides that she really fucking hates herself. She dies on the floor of a shitty motel bathroom, but she wakes up ten minutes later and spends an hour or so standing in the cold shower. 

There’s a chime when she exits, which startles her into dropping the towel she was attempting to tie around her waist. 

Very few people aren’t set to silent these days, and Jade finds herself fuming when it shows up as John responding to her last messages. 

Why the fuck is he even bothering? Stupid selfish asshole. Everyone is such a stupid fucking asshole and Jade is the absolute worst of them all, so she lets John talk to himself and buries herself under thin sheets in a desperate attempt to rot into the bed. 

She lays there for over a day, ignoring the sounds of the nakodiles coming in and out to leave food, which goes untouched. The next morning they bring bacon, and Jade tears into it with a fervor that soon has her spitting it back up into the toilet.

Her head is light, and her phone is silent, and she wishes, not for the first time, that they weren’t the gods of this world. Jade would have been happy meeting her online friends, or going to school. Of course, just like every other good thing in her life, meeting them cost everything else to go to shit. 

The nakodiles pat at her legs and make noises of inquiry until she growls loud enough to scare them off. Then she feels too heavy with guilt to force herself out of bed. 

It isn’t their fault they got stuck taking care of the shittiest god in the universe. Her fur is matted, and her armpits stink, and so after a few days, she accepts the offer of a warm bath. The room is more clean when Jade enters it again, and she feels a flutter of warmth in her heart.

She might not be what they deserve, but at this point, Jade will accept the company wherever she can get it. One of the nakodiles has cracked the window to her room, and she pulls it in, relishing in the freshness which drives out the musty air. 

Spots of sunlight speckle the windowsill, so Jade uses them to warm her palms until she hears muffled whispers coming from outside the door. She knows that it’s time to move on.

Before leaving, Jade makes sure to thank each and every one of the nakodiles for taking such good care of her, and apologises for her extended stay. It doesn’t feel like much of an apology, but seeing as three of the nakodiles are in tears when she walks out, Jade figures she must have done okay.

With her bag on one shoulder, Jade strolls down the side of the road with her thumb sticking out. At first, nobody stops. Why should they? Earth C tenets probably don’t even know the universal sign for ‘hitch-hiker’, unless one of the humans has already displayed it. She giggles to herself and drops her thumb, feeling like an idiot.  
It would seem as though one of the passing carapacians interprets this as a wave, because she pulls over and stares at Jade, eyes shiny and unblinking. Jade mimes joining her on a drive through a series of silly charades, and the carapace nods enthusiastically.

While they drive, Jade talks about her problems, the weather, her depressive episode, and anything else she can think of. The whole time, the carapace nods, turning on her car radio so that Jade does not have to talk in complete silence. 

Together, they head back to the carapace’s apartment, where Jade slides off her shoes, and the carapace offers her a cup of tea. Her voice has long gone silent, so they sit in relative quiet as they watch a game show on TV that makes the carapace erupt into quiet chuckles.

At one point, Jake and Dirk are on TV, and the carapace points them out excitedly. Jade nods, but she can’t muster a smile as she stirs honey into her tea. She ducks out of the apartment when the carapace passes out on the couch, carefully using her powers to lock the door behind her. 

Her steps echo with low ‘thuds’ as Jade trots down the stairs. Halfway down, she remembers that she can fly, but decides to finish her descent the regular way.

Jade checks her phone, and finally opens all of her (thirty) unread messages. It makes her feel pleased, until she notices that they’re all about what she would expect. Ten from Dave, ten from Karkat, and five from John and Rose respectively. She slows her steps by a basketball court and sinks down against the basket, staring at the fading sun in the sky. 

Her hair is sliding from the braids she forced it into during the car ride, and she fingers the split ends of it in distaste. 

Maybe she should go to the doctor. Maybe she should go to the hair salon.

Pink fades into purple and then blue as the sun slips under the tall city buildings, leaving Jade alone with the crickets as she watches the street lamps flicker on. 

She thinks about her friends, she thinks about SBURB, but mostly, running her fingers through her tail, Jade thinks about how she misses Bec more than anything else in the whole wide world.

Something went wrong.


End file.
